May 2011 Archives

A travel tip. The Blog would like to respond to last week's rhetorical but prescient question:

"How bad can a Hyatt in a hot springs resort be?"  Well ...

We can't say we'll be sad to see the back of it, and it's still hard to believe it is a real Hyatt.

Just don't get my male colleagues started on the subject of a) how it's possible to get an omelette wrong, b) why hotels close their bars for private parties, and c) how a hotel can be unable to supply coffee before an early morning departure. Moan, moan, moan ...

Only a few things to say about the APIC Farewell Party, namely ...

1)     The speeches were touching, and the JPCA speakers in their orange happy coats looked festive but dignified.

2)     Great food - sushi, tempura, lots of meat for the ICIS male contingent

3)     The presentation of gifts of thanks to the consultancy speakers (tasteful lacquered pens) created an unplanned but striking tableau with the speakers arranged in (descending) order of height.

4)     Shochu mixed with a lot of ice and water is like schnaps but without the bite.

Friday afternoon at APIC is for product presentations from the various committees, and the events are always held in conference rooms much too large for the thin attendance.

Our own Mahua from ICIS Singapore and Chris Qi from CBI China were invited to give papers on styrenics. The photo is of Mahua developing her theme that even if some styrene derivatives are showing growth, margins are still rubbish.

For more on this gloomy theme, look out for the soon to be launched ICIS Styrene Margin Report and the imminent multilingual ICIS Asian Aromatics Conference to be held in Singapore in July.

I am obliged to Richard for helping us remember the Japanese for thank you (arigatou) with his spontaneous aide memoir of "Harry-Gateau."

Also to Mark S for his top tip on how to remember the Indonesian for thank you (terima kasih): "That well-known Irishman, Terry McAssee."

He also offered "Harry Viderci" for the Italian arrividerci.

All further ideas on language tips which convert into names will be very welcome.

As APIC 2011 in Fukuoka, Japan draws to a close, the Blog gives a round-up of impressions ... 

Best thing about conference hotel: Huge glass arched window and roof over the split level restaurant and bar area, giving it an airy informal atmosphere.

Worst thing about conference hotel: The queues for the lifts. At 11.00 on Friday, there is an orderly line of about 40 men waiting for the lifts (elevators), and this is apparently a feature on the hour every hour as delegates move between their hourly meetings.

Most wacky business dinner: One contact told the Blog he had been out at a formal restaurant with a Japanese company, had a full meal, then they had moved on to another restaurant for a second dinner.

Most uncomfortable feature of conference: In one trader suite in the Hilton, they held their meetings sitting cross-legged or kneeling on the floor around a low table, and after a while it was very tiring on the thighs. On further questioning, the source confirmed that none of the guests had been wearing skirts.

Best party: The Shell reception, quite low-key on the 5^th floor of the Hilton, with abundant Japanese and western food.

Least attended party: One company's event held in a burger bar which understandably, in the land of sushi and noodles, attracted a very small crowd, we hear.

Most interesting new food: Yuzu-kosyo, a spicy green paste flavoured with orange, served at Shell event, perfect on tempura.

Most annoying thing omitted in packing: a working phone. Only 3G phones work in Japan. Now I know.

The 2012 APIC conference will be held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, a source close to the event just told the Blog on the ICIS stand in Fukuoka.

The conference, which moves around Asia, taking turns in each of the member countries, is due to be in Malaysia on 17-18 May next year. The official announcement will be made tomorrow, at the closing party of APIC 2011 in Fukuoka.

It seems the fame of our digital supplements is spreading, and now APIC has picked ICIS to produce the digital version of the conference supplement.

In the meantime, the print version, pictured here, will be circulated at APIC, having been produced jointly by ICIS and Chemical Daily for APIC for 11 years now.

Mary H tells me the first one was in 2000, when she was still with Asian Chemical News (ACN) in the days when it wasn't all called ICIS. "This one is longstanding and has always been joint," she says.
 

The digital version will follow, with articles and interviews from the event.

The 7.30 shuttle bus from the satellite hotels to the conference ploughs through the rain on the elevated highway, from which we get the scenic view of the city. I feel it is not quite what I had imagined in the phrase "hot springs resort."

It is quite common to see people in the streets in face masks, but at the Hyatt I see a man holding a breakfast meeting with a face mask over his mouth, which must seriously impede his ability to talk or eat.

ICIS has a businesslike stand in the press area at the Hilton, and a rather glam suite just off the main lobby - the Red Gazelle, which is a bar by night, and conjures up a pleasantly fleet of foot image for us. Everywhere is slightly smoky.

I'm envious that some of the delegates have come down from Tokyo on the bullet train, which sounds like the perfect way to see the country.

I catch a few of the morning presentations, and am reminded that there is no point in showing a flattering photo of yourself to people who can see what you really look like.

The most memorable slide is one of Chinese protesters holding placards. They were not protesting about jobs: they were looking for employees.

In a morning meeting, I hear an interesting snippet about a well-known "trader move," but am enjoined to keep it under wraps until July.

On the seatback on the China Eastern flight to Fukuoka today is this enticing advert for: "Gorgeous Human Origin Intoxicant Fertile Jianshi."

Whatever it is, the Blog feels sure we could all benefit from some.

As we travel towards Fukuoka, we pick up an entourage of chemical travellers. Expectations for the conference are mixed.

One conference speaker was told by APIC a week ago that registrations were lower than expected, at just over 1,300*, so the print runs for conference programmes had been reduced.

He also observes that, with the recent consolidation among petrochemical consultancies, the conference programme now consists of multiple sessions from the same company, and that this will have to be addressed before the next APIC.

The next APIC, in 2012, should be held in Malaysia, he adds.

Our Chinese companions are concerned about the risk of further earthquakes while we are there. And one recent visitor to Japan notes that citizens were dimming lights and running aircon at lower rates to support the reconstruction effort.

(* This was revised to over 1,400 in an announcement at the APIC Farewell Party on 27 May 2011.)

(photo: Petronas Towers, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia)

Lavatory humour being the lynchpin of British comedy, the Blog is entranced by this billboard advert spotted today on the highway to Shanghai Pudong airport: "Nu Mi - the World's Most Advanced Toilet."

After I wrote about the futuristic Toto toilets in Pudong airport last year, a colleague wrote from New York to say that he and his wife already had one of these on their wish list. It is probably time to upgrade to a Nu Mi now, if he doesn't want to be left behind in the aspirational toilet stakes.

(NB The white box in the photo is the toilet.)

Hotel buffet breakfasts are a safe and unthreatening place to try new dishes without risking offence to one's hosts. So the Blog is proud to have at last tried the traditional Chinese breakfast of congee (gruel-like rice porridge) with marmite-flavoured tofu, pickles and something red and salty.

The Blog is not averse to salty breakfasts, even very early in the morning, but the red stuff was probably a step too far for a complete beginner. Apart from that, it isn't a bad way to start the day.

The highlight of the Chinese breakfast buffet was however the array of tropical fruits including some miniature mangoes, small enough to fit on a dessert spoon, and some tiny plums, the size of a cherry. Both were quite hard work, with the stones constituting most of the fruit, but worth it for flavour and presentation, if not nutritional value.

At the check-in desk at the BA airport lounge there is a card propped up: "Our staff are entitled to work in an abuse-free environment ..."

What a shameful comment on the behaviour of business travellers. The ground stewardess tells me the school holidays are the worst, with parents wanting to bring more than one guest into the lounge, often their whole families. It is pretty bad that business travellers are prepared to behave badly in front of their children.

I am a great believer in the written complaint, or even the written compliment for good service, because at least it will reach the right person. The BA warning card makes me think it would be a good idea to have an equivalent phone message you could switch on selectively for in-coming calls from difficult people.

Lots of businesses already have a recorded message you have to wait through before you are connected - generally about calls being recorded for training purposes, or trying to up-sell new products.

I am already drafting my recorded message: "Value your call ... bla, bla ...thank you for taking the time ... bla, bla ... other market players may not necessarily agree with your opinions ... watch your mouth!" I'll have to get Marketing to finesse that.

I love this cab firm. When I call they answer the phone with "Hello Barbara, how are you today?" When I tell them I'd like to book a cab, they tell me my address. It works every time.

I'd thought that was the height of perfection for a cab firm, but now they have exceeded expectations, as we say in our performance appraisals. They send a car which is scarily silent. When we stop at the Hampton crossroads, I think the car has stalled: there is no sound from the engine at all. And as if that wasn't enough, the driver puts on Radio 4 and we listen to the omnibus edition of the Archers all the way to the airport. Who needs a limo? This is the life.

At last, after weeks of on-off-on-off discussions with fellow petchem travellers, we're on our way to APIC in Fukuoka, Japan.

After weeks of wanting to support the event but not wanting to go pointlessly, if everyone else was staying away. And after weeks of expecting it to relocate somewhere else, ideally Singapore, and cross-checking who was going and who was not going, we are at last on the move.

It was at the end of April over the bank holiday weekend of the Royal Wedding, when the UK was closed for business but the rest of the world was apparently still working, the Blog received four emails from contacts who had belatedly decided to go. It wasn't a full scale vote of confidence, but it was the beginning of a small scale domino effect.

So now, after all the delay, we are staying at the second-best APIC hotel option, the Hyatt, which is 15 minutes away from the main conference hotel, the Hilton Sea Hawk Fukuoka which is, encouragingly, fully booked. That is the price you pay for dithering, but fortunately plenty of other ditherers have chosen to make their base at the Hyatt, so it is quite convenient for meetings and après-hours events. And how bad can a Hyatt in a hot springs resort be?

(photo Fukuoka: Rex)

Crime and punishment do not go together in the case of former fugitive billionaire oil trader Marc Rich. Pardoned by President Bill Clinton for crimes of tax evasion and illegal oil trading with Iran, he is now living out an old age of luxury and philanthropy in Switzerland.

He was once a resident of Zug, which is still favoured by oil and chemical traders, some of whom are, like Rich, also ex-Phibro.

Now his life story is about to be made into a movie, based on one of his admiring biographies, "The King of Oil: The Secret Lives of Marc Rich," by Daniel Ammann (2009.)

The film rights have been picked up by Imagine Entertainment, according to this article in the New York Post. 

A fashion craze for extra-pointy cowboy boots is sweeping Mexico and picking up a lot of press coverage in the US and Europe. Apparently the men's pointy boots are great for dancing in, and make the wearers popular with the girls.

The Blog is asking all Houston readers to be on the alert for the first sighting of the pointy boots at an industry event. It is too late for the Southwest Chems spring golf outing, so we may have wait until the fall event.

 (photo: Daily Buzz Nation)

Specialty chemicals group Lanxess announced today that it would be moving to Cologne from its current base in Leverkusen, Germany in the second half of 2013.

It will move 1,000 employees to the former Lufthansa headquarters on Deutzer Freiheit in the Deutz area of the city.

The Copenhagen EPL meeting set for June at the Marriott Hotel on the Kalvebod Brygge waterfront has run into problems with hotel bookings, according to an email warning from EPL to members today.

Delegates are already grumbling that they have been unable to get bookings for the night of 15 June 2011, ahead of the EPL dinner on 16 June.

It is not that the hotel is sold out, the Copenhagen Marriott reservations office told the Blog, but that they only have rooms at 3,799.00 Danish Krone (DKK) per night (€510, $726, £447.)

The EPL is recommending that delegates try some neighbouring four star hotels, where the rates are a third of the price and more like 1,315 DKK per night.

This advert across a double-page spread in the Middle East-themed ICB issue of 16 May 2011 celebrates the 25^th anniversary of Saudi Arabia-based National Industrialisation Co (TASNEE), and has been selected for the Blog's occasional series on noteworthy chemical adverts by virtue of its grand scale, its striking use of colour and the boldness of the artist's vision in constructing a giant mirrored twenty-five in the middle of the desert.

There's a neat map with details of all the Middle East cracker projects on pp 36-37 too.

Solar Impulse, the world's only totally solar powered plane, is expected to fly from Switzerland to Brussels tomorrow and you can watch it all on a live App.

The project is supported by Solvay and Bayer Material Science among others, and none of them seem concerned about the unpropitious date of Friday 13 May.

In a press release today, they said that the weather was looking good, and that the plane would be taking off from Payerne, Switzerland at around 06:00 and would be landing at Brussels airport some time after 21:00 hours. So the flight should last approximately 12 hours, they said - not ideal for business travel, but pretty impressive for a plane powered purely by the sun.

Journalists are being invited to attend the landing at Brussels and even offered the chance of in-flight interviews with the pilot.

Alan Green, formerly of ConocoPhillips, has joined the due diligence and environment, health and safety (EHS) adviser Pilko & Associates in its European, Middle East & Asia team, based in London.

Enthusing about the addition of Green to his team, chairman George Pilko wrote in his email announcement on 11 May 2011: "We expect a surge of cross-border deals with significant activity in North America and Europe in the chemicals and energy sectors, (so) ... Pilko & Associates is ideally positioned to advise companies and their stakeholders in these complex, multi-jurisdictional situations."

The ICIS news team is agog to see what this surge in mergers and acquisitions is going to mean to the North American and European petchem markets.

A cartoon poking fun at consultants whose petrochemical market forecasts are all remarkably similar, is in this week's newsletter from Chemical Market Resources Inc in Houston.

Marc Van Nievelt will be joining the sales force at distributor Koppers in the Netherlands on 24 May 2011, selling carbon black and other related products, he told Caroline today.

Marc, formerly at distributor Bax Chemicals for 10 years, was actively trading for the last six. His successor at Bax has yet to be announced. In the meantime Norman Woelke will be handling Marc's portfolio.

When I first published this spectacular picture of the infinity pool at the Marina Bay Sands Skypark in Singapore, little did I think that there would soon be two petchems conferences there.

The ICIS/Tecnon 15th World Chlor-Alkali Conference and 5th ICIS Asian Aromatics & Derivatives Conference will be there, so look out for some photos pf petchems folk disporting themselves around the pool after conference sessions.

Southwest Chemical Association held its Spring Golf Outing on Monday 2 May 2011 at the Kingwood Country Club, Houston, and ICIS was there to sponsor the bev carts again.

Says Heather: "This is our 9th year to do so. Hundreds of our customers are at this event and everyone knows who ICIS is there!" Heather's photos from the May event are below ...

(photo above: Southwest Chemical Association)

The French TV crime series "Engrenages" (Spiral), now coming to a nail-biting close on UK TV, is a graphic display of all the kinds of dysfunctional behaviour which are expressly forbidden in any sane company's Code of Conduct.

Setting aside all the obvious differences between French crime-fighting and everyday corporate life as we know it (murder, vice, dismemberment, blackmail, Albanian organised crime) the series demonstrates clearly why companies tend to frown on:

• Inappropriate office relationships
• Misuse of office furniture
• Tampering with records of conversations
• Breaking in to locked offices
• Co-workers betraying each other for career advantage
• Teams refusing to co-operate with each other
• Bribery, nepotism and dishonesty amongst lawyers

A new name in the petchem trading world is Petrochemical East, which traders say has recently started up with some former traders from Summit. A new company website will be ready in a couple of weeks, a company source messaged us today.

The Blog has been on holiday for a large chunk of April, resulting in fewer than usual postings.

First there was a nice long vacation at the beginning of the month to coincide with the university holidays. Then there was this year's epic "11 for 3" holiday at the end of the month, when 6 million UK workers took advantage of the two Easter bank holidays, then the Royal Wedding-to-May Day bank holiday combination, to enjoy some fantastic weather or grab some long-haul flights for big family holidays.

As a result, the Blog's tally of postings for April 2011 was unusually low, as shown in the monthly archive column on the right. The usual monthly total is around 25-30, but this April it was a paltry 10. (Formula: number of postings > number of days worked.)

The number of visitors to the Blog was also down, proving that typical readers do it at their desks during working hours. Nonetheless, one striking feature this month is the popularity of the "Who's Who-style" job moves items. April was a good month for these, and the Blog is grateful to all those who moved job in the last month, particularly those who keep moving job and providing plenty of blogging material.

Eva Hatzidemou will take over the role of Commercial Manager Styrene Europe & Africa at Shell Chemicals Europe from Eric Faes from 1 May 2011, he announced in an email to business partners on Monday.

Faes will take up the position of Director Styrenics Chain in Plastics Europe in Brussels for Belgian Shell NV on the same date, after five years in the Commercial Manager job.